Serializing - Deserializing a data structure in RoR

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi. I have a data structure, with arrays and hashes, with several data types inside. For instance:

{

:conditions => [ ‘stand_id = ?’ , 1], :limit => 10,

:offset => 10 }

I want to serialize this structure in a string, to be stored , then another day in other session I would like to restore it exactly as it is, for instance symbols remain symbols, arrays remain arrays, hashes remain hashes and so on for other data types. How can I do that in Ruby / RoR?

Thanks, Vinicius

2

Serializing is called 'Marshalling' in Ruby.

Marshalling is not at all difficult in Ruby, check for example

http://phrogz.net/ProgrammingRuby/ref_m_marshal.html

You could also use YAML to do the same, see http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/YAML.html

3

Let's say you want to put this in myobject.foo.

myobject.foo = s.to_yaml

Pretty easy.

Now you've retrieved myobject from the database and you want to load s with the stuff that's serialized in foo.

s = YAML::load(myobject.foo)